Welcome! This site is sort of a storehouse for information I've uncovered while researching my family's history. I decided to pull all this stuff together in a single, publicly accessible place in hopes that others might find it useful. Most of my family lines seem not to have been researched much--at least not online. The public end of my family research begins with my great-grandparents--who, you'll find, are helpfully listed in the sidebar. I've decided to limit myself to two sets of G-Gs for now. (Hopefully, that list will help orient you a bit when confronted with a tangle of names.) For simplicity's sake, I have decided to identify which side of the family is which (Mom's side vs. Dad's side). I'm going to leave my grandparents' names and genders ambiguous, however--and I'll follow the same policy for any great-aunts or -uncles I might happen to mention. I tried drafting some blog posts with this ambiguous-grandparent policy in mind, and I was having a terrible time trying to both (1) write clearly, and (2) avoid gender words like "his" and "her." My grandparents are huge sources of information for me, but I couldn't simply say, "Grandpa always said his dad loved snow." No no--I had to say, "My great-grandfather loved snow, according to my grandparent." Terrible! Well, I've found a solution. I'll employ a modified "Splat" system when talking about my grandparents and others whose gender I want to keep private. That is, I'll replace letters in gender-specific words (like "he" and "she") with a "splat," or asterisk (*), to hide the gender. So, for example, I'll use
So the two grandparents I'll be dealing with here become
This sounds complicated, but it'll free me from no end of tortured-syntax headaches (and save everyone else from reading the awful results). It's also, I think, pretty easy to adapt to, since we're all used to seeing abbreviations and censored words anyway (especially online). Observe: "Grand*a always said h* dad loved snow." |